Dan Zhu made his Carnegie Hall début at the age of 18 performing the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto and now makes his Hong Kong Philharmonic début with the high spirits and dazzling virtuosity of Saint-Saëns’s Third Concerto. Paris in the first decades of the 20th Century was the home of Sergey Diaghilev and his Ballets russes, inspiring composers such as Debussy and Stravinsky to create some of their most brilliant and inventive scores.

In Respighi’s charming suite, the music of baroque composers is revisited in each delicate portrait of a dove, a hen, a nightingale and a cuckoo. Outstanding young pianists Lio Kuok-wai and Lio Kuok-man join forces in Saint-Saëns’s playful and exuberant parade of the animal kingdom in which he pokes out his tongue at a few composers of the 19th Century, including Rossini and Mendelssohn. The looming shadow of fate is cast over the whole Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony from its menacing opening fanfare, but the symphony’s frenetic final pages ultimately manage to escape destiny in a desperate race at breakneck speed.

Czech conductor Zden k Mácal has conducted all of the greatest orchestras all over the world but recently reached an entirely new and vast audience through his appearances as Sebastiano Vieira in the hugely popular Japanese TV series Nodame Cantabile. A revered authority in the music of his homeland, Mácal leads Dvo ák’s rousing Seventh Symphony and is joined by Malaysian-Chinese pianist John Chen, winner of the 2004 Sydney International Piano Competition, in Rachmaninov’s darkly passionate Second Piano Concerto.